Radka Donnell famous quotes

My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life. ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
-- Radka Donnell

#Art #Quilts #Focus

My quiltmaking is sandwiched, moved about, displaced between other activities and the crosscurrents of people's movements inside the place I live.
-- Radka Donnell

#People #Movement #Moved

I work out of silence, because silence makes up for my actual lack of working space. Silence substitutes for actual space, for psychological distance, for a sense of privacy and intactness. In this sense silence is absolutely necessary.
-- Radka Donnell

#Distance #Space #Work Out

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

Art, however innocent, looks like deceiving.

I've always been a bit of a mix between art and technology. I used to paint a lot, but I'm not very good with my hands. It has always been a fusion between my computer gaming interests and being exposed to the rich data of society that we live in.

Any fool can make a quilt; and, after we had made a couple of dozen over twenty years ago, we quit the business with a conviction that nobody but a fool would spend so much time in cutting bits of dry goods into yet small bits and sewing them together again, just for the sake of making believe that they were busy at practical work.

When I look back on my career - if that's what it is - it looks a bit like a crazy quilt, and I think it's just really because, when one job has finished, I've never really been in a position where I had three or four options.

The radical right is so homophobic that they're blaming global warming on the AIDS quilt.

Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

Really, most of us just focus on what's in front of us. We're too busy putting out the fires of everyday life.